IndiaAI Mission Releases Indigenous AI Foundation Models EKA-1 and Dhīr
Ministry of Electronics & IT · Science & Tech · Posted 03 NOV 2026 10:02PM
What happened
The Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) released indigenous foundation models EKA-1 and Dhīr (Dhīr 2B & 5B) under the IndiaAI Innovation Centre pillar of the IndiaAI Mission. These models aim to foster homegrown AI capabilities for diverse sectors ranging from finance to defense.
Why it matters for UPSC
This release highlights India's strategic push towards technological autonomy in Artificial Intelligence, directly relevant to the UPSC syllabus theme of achievements of Indians in science & technology and indigenization of technology.
Key objectives
- Release of indigenous foundation models EKA-1 by Soket and Dhīr (2B and 5B) by ZenteiQ under the IndiaAI Mission.
- EKA-1 features 26.3 billion parameters, trained on ~7.5 trillion tokens across 22 scheduled Indian languages and English.
- Dhīr 2B & 5B support English and 10 Indian languages for secure, on-premise, offline-capable deployment in critical sectors.